Universities and medical schools have been criticised for increasing the number of animals used in research by more than 50% since 1996 while industry has reduced its procedures by 20% over the same period.

Campaigners say that a cultural inertia has meant that academics have been slow to adopt options such as tissue cultures or computer models. They argue there should be more funding to encourage researchers to find other options.

Gill Langley, director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, said: "There is an ivory tower mentality still ... there's no support for academic researchers who want to think about a different way." Dr Langley and her colleagues have published a paper in the journal Bioessays.

But academic research was defended by Simon Festing, director of the Research Defence Society. "When it comes to research, it is really very difficult to find alternatives to model some complex disorders. For many cases one can't even imagine a replacement alternative."

An artificial layer of skin cells in a lab, for example, may be sufficient to gauge the effectiveness of a skin cream, but it is much more difficult to replace the complex mixture of symptoms involved in a disease such as multiple sclerosis, he points out. Even the fastest super-computers are only just capable of predicting the folding of a single protein let alone the way the body reacts to a particular disease. Dr Festing said that both academia and industry had boosted their use of non-animal methods, but that the volume of medical research had nearly doubled in the last 10 years without a substantial increase in animal testing. Since 1996 the number of tests done by universities and medical schools has risen from 843,800 to 1,318,100 while industry reduced its number of procedures from 1,281,800 to 1,026,500. Rodents account for 83% of procedures, while dogs, cats, horses and primates account for less than 1%.

"Industry has invested massively in replacements," Dr Festing said. "There is every incentive to stop the use of animals because of the ethical issues and because they are very expensive."

Anthony Jones at Manchester University, who is also an author on the paper, said a lack of investment in alternatives was a significant factor in preventing university researchers changing their methods. "However some universities, such as my own, are beginning to make substantial investments in this area. More collaboration between academia and industry could help replace more animal experiments whilst also developing better-focused therapies for patients."

In 2006 the National Centre for the Refinement, Replacement and Reduction of Animals in Research - a publicly funded body - awarded nine research grants totalling £1.4m to studies which aimed to reduce the use of animals in research.